, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this
tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,
liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old gate
had the air of saying: "This garden belongs to me."

It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every side,
the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple of paces
away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of Deputies
not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the Rue
Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in vain
did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other's
course at the neighboring cross-roads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;
and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had passed
over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness,
forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to
this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, great
crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles,
uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depths
of the earth and to reappear between those four walls a certain
indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts
the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly
where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in the eagle,
to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with as much rude force
and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.

Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound
and penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolute
satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause
or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable
ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.
Everything toils at everything.

Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits
the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the
course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not
determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal
ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the
reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches
of creation? The tinie